A work of both practical commonsense advice and spiritual wisdom, this book defines four types of human happiness that conform to human nature and mark the human condition, a hierarchy of values that ascend from the first level of happiness provided by the enjoyment of pleasures and the comforts of material possessions to the highest level of transcendence in which man experiences a loving relationship with God and contemplates the meaning of the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
As man graduates from the first to the fourth level, he experiences a sense of completeness in the possession of a happiness that Fr. Spitzer calls “pervasive,” “enduring,” and “deep.”
The pursuit of happiness proceeds through four stages as man not only discovers the delight of the senses and the gratification of bodily appetites on the first level but also relishes the joy of achievements that provide great satisfaction on the second level: the feeling of accomplishment like earning a degree, receiving a promotion, purchasing a home, or receiving an honor. In the first and second types of happiness, however, the pleasure does not extend beyond the self.
Gaining in financial prosperity or improving one’s social status limit a person’s participation in the fullness of joy that awaits him if he does not rise to the higher levels. Honors and achievements alone are not “pervasive” or inclusive enough. Delighting in the gratifications of eating, drinking, traveling, and vacationing is not “enduring.”
The joys of the first two levels do not go beyond bodily satisfaction and social approval, not reaching the depths of the soul or nourishing the mind with the highest knowledge or purest joy. As the quest continues, man learns of nobler sources of happiness and advances to the third stage that the author identifies as “contributive,” the many ways that persons enrich and bless the lives of others with love, friendship, care, and affection.
As man recognizes that the pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment of the first three stages — while natural sources of happiness — do not perfectly fulfill man’s transcendental desires for everlasting joy and union with God, he turns to the fourth level. Here the restless human heart yearning for the perfection of heavenly beatitude and the fullness of happiness without change or loss seeks a greater knowledge and love of God, “a dynamic encounter.”
Spitzer explains all of these levels with clarity, thoroughness, and telling examples: While “every level of happiness is good and has its proper place,” certain temptations accompany them because they can blind or limit a person’s view of higher, ultimate things. For example, to remain on the first or second level and define the source of happiness exclusively in terms of pleasure, comfort, or wealth ignores the riches of the life of the mind and soul. To remain on the second level and always view life as a form of competition to defeat one’s rivals for lucrative prizes and prestigious positions easily leads to egocentricity and narcissism.
Those who stay complacent and make success, status, wealth, or luxury the dominant view of happiness soon identify it solely with “winning “ rather “losing” in the competition of life, and they inevitably disregard the importance of the profoundly human aspects that enrich happiness: “They do not see their personhood, personality, lovability, love of others, and empathy as being important.”
Thus those obsessed only with the first or second kind of happiness “underlive” their lives and fail to experience the abundant life Christ promised which the psalmist expressed: “Taste and see the sweetness of the Lord.”
As Spitzer forcefully argues, lack of financial or social success and even disappointment and failure never define the worth of a human being. Other criteria need to replace worldly standards in order to understand the fullness of happiness that life offers and God gives. Instead of reacting with a sense of inferiority, depression, or self-pity when people fail to win or gain the prize, they must “find new categories to define life and self — categories that are not reducible to things or ego-comparative qualities, but instead open upon our noble, loving, lovable, transcendent, spiritual selves.”
When the pursuit of happiness never aspires beyond the first and second levels but instead seeks reputation, image, popularity, and praise as the essence of life, many gloat over their achievements and belittle others with contempt. Ego-centered and narcissistic, the successful achievers fall into the sins of pride and envy, never grateful for their blessings and always discontented when their highest ambitions fail.
While those who know happiness on the third and fourth levels show gratitude, share their joy and blessings with others, express a love of neighbor and a love of God, the overachievers ruled by secular standards never feel at home in the world or in themselves and compulsively seek more adulation and recognition. In short, comfort, pleasure, and success are not “ends in themselves” but stepping stones to the higher levels of full human happiness.
Spitzer shows that those who remain on the first and second levels and never fulfill the higher transcendental desires for truth, goodness, and beauty inevitably encounter a sense of alienation, loneliness, emptiness, and guilt — all problems that the contributive and transcendental aspects of happiness alleviate. To address these problems and “to escape your personal hell,” the author recommends certain fundamental changes of attitude that transform a person’s whole sense of direction and purpose in life.
First, a person needs to redefine his primary purpose in life from personal pleasure and material accumulation to contributions to family, society, church, and the common good. Instead of seeking admiration and kudos, he needs to earn the love and gratitude of others.
Second, a person must notice the good in others and see them in their “lovability,” as images of God — as mysteries rather than problems — rather than as rivals whom he envies and resents for their success.
Third, persons must adopt a view of themselves beyond marketable skills and professional prestige that deserve “esteem” but do not evoke “love” in the way that personal qualities such as kindness, humility, compassion, and charity form the basis of human relationships that produce fruitful, joy-filled lives.
Fourth, persons must develop a responsible, rational sense of freedom that exercises discipline and constraint — a change that distinguishes between “freedom from” and “freedom for” — freedom from license, addiction, and enslavement and freedom for love of neighbor and God and works of mercy.
This new understanding, then, honors commitments and fulfills duties rather than championing autonomy and radical individualism. These changes in attitude depend on learning from Christ’s example. He enjoyed others, listened to them, spent time with beloved friends, and served them — He was One “who had time to be with sinners, the poor, and the weak; who enjoyed His relationships with the simple and the powerful; who listened to the cry of the poor as well as ‘the wise of the world’.”
In this transition from the first two levels to the higher two levels, man must not stop at the third level lest he find that “something is missing” and that he is wasting his life and not following his vocation and highest responsibility — a state of mind that produces what Spitzer calls “cosmic alienation” and “cosmic loneliness: “When we are not in relation to others, we feel a mere fraction of ourselves, and the deeper our relationship with others, the deeper our experience of ourselves.”
However, even though other people breathe life, energy, and vitality into one’s life, man’s most important relationship binds him to God, and “no human relationship will be able to take the place of this transcendent one,” a relationship in which man participates in the eternal battle of good and evil and realizes he is part of something greater than himself.
This transcendent level attunes a person to an appreciation of God’s divine Providence both in the world and in his own life and sensitizes him to the wonder of the transcendentals like beauty: the beauty of the natural world, of sacred music and art, of holy people:
“Notice that when you allow yourself to be drawn into the life of the sacred, the Lord responds more intensely, with an invitation to even deeper things.”
On the first level man seeks to satisfy the basic needs essential for survival — food, clothing, shelter — called the “External-Pleasure-Material” plane of existence. The author calls the second tier of happiness the realm of “Ego-Comparative desire,” the acquisition of distinctions, prizes, and status that follow from the success of reaching one’s goals.
The third form of happiness Spitzer describes as “Contributive-Empathetic,” explained as “the contributive desire to make a positive difference to someone or something beyond ourselves.” This desire conquers the ego-centricity and narcissism that develop when human happiness remains on the first two levels, and it combats the sense of emptiness and meaninglessness a person confronts in the realization that he made no positive difference in any other person’s life.

Real Sources Of Happiness

However, the ultimate degree of happiness corresponds to man’s innate sense of the holy, sacred, and spiritual that intuits “a mysterious, awe-inspiring power” common to all religions that Spitzer calls the “numinous” experience. This desire for transcendence expresses itself in man’s longing for perfect justice, perfect beauty, and perfect goodness that man’s mortality in the fallen world of the human condition never absolutely satisfies.
All these truths about happiness make excellent sense, validate knowledge from other fields of learning that lead to similar conclusions, and correspond to Christ’s teachings and the spiritual wisdom of the Church.
As Spitzer concludes, man needs more than the offerings of the first three levels of happiness because “we expect more, need more, and want more because we are created for more. We are transcendent beings who recognize and desire the transcendent, spiritual, sacred, and religious.”
To ignore this aspect of happiness inevitably leads to an existence in which “we will surely underlive our lives, undervalue our dignity, and underestimate our destiny — a perfectly avoidable waste and tragedy.” The secular world and the mass of humanity need to know the real sources of happiness that transcend the consumerism of a society manipulated by propaganda and the media’s image of the good life.

Vatican City, Feb 17, 2018 / 05:10 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Saturday the Vatican announced that Pope Francis has reconfirmed Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston as head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, also reconfirming seven members…Continue Reading

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In response to the Trump administration’s 2019 federal budget proposal on Monday, the U.S. Catholic bishops are urging for a budget that shows greater concern for “‘the least of these” and warning that the U.S. “must never seek…Continue Reading

A Connecticut high school student may have to decide whether to remove a Planned Parenthood sticker on her laptop or leave her Catholic school after administrators told her to remove it, her parents said. Sophomore Kate Murray’s parents told the Greenwich Time that…Continue Reading

February 8, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The Bible’s condemnation of homosexual acts should be taken in “context” with Biblical times, Jesuit Father James Martin toldGeorgetown University students recently. Martin said as well that Catholics who support gay “marriage” should have no problem…Continue Reading

JACKSON, Mississippi, February 2, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A bill banning abortion on babies more than 15 weeks old passed the Mississippi state House today 79-31. House Bill 1510 would make Mississippi the state with the most pro-life laws if it…Continue Reading

Just three Democrats in the U.S. Senate supported a bill on Monday that would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks when unborn babies are capable of feeling pain. The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which has strong public support from Republicans…Continue Reading

ROME, January 30, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – In an exclusive interview two weeks after issuing a profession of immutable truths about sacramental marriage, Bishop Athanasius Schneider is inviting his brother bishops around the world to join in raising a common voice…Continue Reading

As Katholisch.de, the official website of the German bishops, reports today, Cardinal Willem Eijk, the Dutch cardinal and Metropolitan Archbishop of Utrecht, requested that Pope Francis bring light into the confusion concerning the question as to how to deal with…Continue Reading

When Selena Miller, a practicing Catholic, applied to DePaul, she had no idea it was a Catholic university. Damita Meneves, another practicing Catholic, said she has met only one other Catholic student in her first year at DePaul. DePaul is…Continue Reading

His Eminence, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, spoke recently with Thinking with the Church, hosted by Chris Altieri, who is also a regular contributor to Catholic World Report. Cardinal Burke responds to questions regarding the interpretation and reception of the post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris…Continue Reading

Untitled 5Untitled 2

Attention Readers: Welcome to
our website. Readers who are familiar with The Wanderer know we have been
providing Catholic news and orthodox commentary for 150 years in our weekly
print edition.
Our daily version offers only some of what we publish weekly in print. To take
advantage of everything The Wanderer publishes, we encourage you to
subscribe
to our flagship weekly print edition,
which is mailed every Friday or, if you want to view it in its entirety online,
you can subscribe to the E-edition,
which is a replica of the print edition. Our daily edition includes: a selection of
material from recent issues of our print edition, news stories updated daily
from renowned news sources, access to archives from The Wanderer from the past
10 years, available at a minimum charge (this will be expanded as time goes
on). Also: regularly updated features where we go back in time and highlight
various columns and news items covered in The Wanderer over the past 150 years.
And: a comments section in which your remarks are encouraged, both good and bad,
including suggestions. We encourage you to become a daily visitor to
our site. If you appreciate our site, tell your friends. As Catholics we must
band together to rediscover our faith and share it with the world if we are to
effectively counter a society whose moral culture seems to have no boundaries
and a government whose rapidly extending reach threatens to extinguish the
rights of people of faith to practice their religion (witness the HHS mandate).
Now more than ever, vehicles like The Wanderer are needed for clarification and
guidance on the issues of the day. Catholic, conservative, orthodox, and loyal to the
Magisterium have been this journal’s hallmarks for five generations. God
willing, our message will continue well into this century and beyond.

By DON FIER (Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and Founder of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wis., graciously took time out of his busy schedule to grant The Wanderer a wide-ranging interview during a recent visit to the Shrine. Included among the topics…Continue Reading

By RAYMOND LEO CARDINAL BURKE (Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke delivered the address below at the 32nd Annual Church Teaches Forum, “The Message of Fatima: Peace for the World,” Galt House, Louisville, Ky., July 22, 2017. The address is reprinted here with the kind permission of Cardinal Burke. All rights reserved. This is part one of the…Continue Reading

Catechism

Today . . .

There’s nothing, it seems, that the abortion chain Planned Parenthood won’t sue over. On Thursday, affiliates of the abortion chain in seven states sued the Trump administration for cutting funding for their questionable teen pregnancy prevention programs. The Daily Nonpareil reports the lawsuits argue that the Trump administration wrongly cut their funding prematurely and without cause. Nine groups, including Planned Parenthood affiliates in Washington, Iowa, North Carolina, South C

CAMBRIDGE, England, February 15, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A respected Catholic historian and philosopher challenged Cardinal Blase Cupich during a lecture last week about Pope’ Francis so-called “revolution of mercy” that has caused what many are defending as a “paradigm shift” in Catholic practice. Professor John Rist, after listening to a February 9 lecture at Cambridge Universityin which Cardinal Cupich praised Pope Francis’ “paradigm shift” in Catholic practice, asked the Cardinal at the end of the lect

VIENNA, Austria, February 14, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Austria’s bishops, led by Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, are indignant over a retired bishop’s passionate defense of Catholic teaching in opposing Church “blessings” for homosexual unions. After Bishop Andreas Laun, the retired Auxiliary Bishop of Salzburg, Austria, published Monday his strong rebuke of the German bishops for proposing to bless homosexual couples, there has been an inten

Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago is all for clarity. It has been a consistent theme, as when in September of 2017 he issued a decree banning guns in all parishes, schools and other facilities across the archdiocese “so there would be absolute clarity on our position.” His official statement put “clarity” in italics. When he was bishop of Rapid City, he called for “civility and clarity” in discussing legislation that would limit abortion, but he…Continue Reading

BEIJING — A group of influential Catholics published an open letter Monday express their shock and disappointment at report that the Vatican could soon reach a deal with the Chinese government, warning that it could create a schism in the church in China. The Holy See has been in negotiations for several years with the Chinese Communist Party and is now belie

Advertisement(2)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Within a week of taking office on January 23, 2017, President Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, now called the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance, which bans U.S. funding for abortions overseas. The expanded policy prohibits $9 billion in U.S. taxpayer money from funding foreign organizations that perform or…Continue Reading

By HANNAH BROCKHAUS VATICAN CITY (CNA/EWTN News) — The Congregation for the Causes of Saints has approved the second miracle needed for the canonization of Blessed Pope Paul VI, allowing his canonization to take place, possibly later this year. According to Vatican Insider, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints approved the miracle by a…Continue Reading

By STEPHEN M. KRASON (Editor’s Note: Stephen M. Krason’s Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic column appears monthly [sometimes bimonthly] in Crisis. He is professor of political science and legal studies and associate director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is also cofounder and president of…Continue Reading

By LISA BOURNE (Editor’s Note: LifeSiteNews ran this story on February 5.) + + + A Catholic priest is calling on bishops to excommunicate the 14 Catholic-identifying U.S. senators who voted two weeks ago against banning late-term abortions. He is also calling on priests to deny the Catholic pro-abortion senators Holy Communion. “Today is the…Continue Reading

By JAMES LIKOUDIS The centuries-old theological debate concerning the existence of Limbo for unbaptized babies (the limbo puerorum as a state of natural happiness) led to the 2007 publication of the document The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized by the International Theological Commission (ITC). The commission concluded there are “serious…Continue Reading

Advertisement

Our Catholic Faith (Section B of print edition)

By DON FIER For a variety of reasons (a defect of consent, a diriment impediment, or a defect of the required form), many supposed modern-day marriages entered into by Catholic persons are invalid from their origin in the eyes of God and the Church. However, as we saw last week, depending on the circumstances, the Church has procedures by which…Continue Reading

Q. Concerning what our Blessed Mother said in Fatima about the rosary, I am confused as to whether or not she meant us to meditate on the mysteries while we are praying the Hail Marys or whether she meant us to meditate on the mysteries right before we say the Hail Marys. The consensus seems to be that we are…Continue Reading

By FR. ROBERT ALTIER Second Sunday Of Lent Readings: Gen. 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18 Romans 8:31b-34 Mark 9:2-10 In the first reading today we hear about Abraham’s nearly incomprehensible act of faith and love for God shown in his willingness to sacrifice his own son. We have to be careful not to read this in a vacuum. This test, which…Continue Reading

By ANDREA GAGLIARDUCCI (Wanderer Editor’s Note: Catholic News Agency on February 3 published a commentary concerning a 1989 Vatican response to dissent against Humanae Vitae. Below is an excerpted version of that commentary. Following that, we reprint the full text of the 1989 Vatican response, which, as the CNA commentary explains, is now available on the Vatican’s website. Please also…Continue Reading

By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK A joke sometimes recounted among clergy goes along these lines: Someone greets a wise old priest by asking, “What’s new?”, and he responds, sagely, “Christ is risen!” The humor here is less about what’s new than about the fact that everything, other than the only true revolution of Christ’s Incarnation and triumph over death, is…Continue Reading

By CAROLE BRESLIN Great sinners make great saints. It takes a strong-willed child to become a saint. These are statements which would easily fit saints such as Mary Magdalene and St. Augustine. In the thirteenth century, a young lady free in spirit and strong in will led such a life that she was essentially driven from her home village, but…Continue Reading

By CAROLE BRESLIN In the lives of the saints one thing is very common: They have such a strong desire to do God’s will that nothing will hinder their work. Many saints, despite illness, weak health, or many other obstacles achieved their goals. Frequently the amount of work accomplished by such individuals seems humanly impossible — and, of course, it…Continue Reading